Let's Try Something New...

September 20, 2015 09:03PM | Matt Kava

It’s probably time to try something new. I’ve written all of my websites for the last three years by hand, and that scratches an itch, but it doesn’t lead to a website with really great content. So let’s try something new and use Jekyll to do all of the generation. I’m lazy, I know it, so just being able to write an article or blog post and be able to just upload it and know that it’ll be posted is great. No messy PHP scripts to worry about, so unless I do something dumb, less security concerns and the website should be overall easier to maintain. Let’s see how this goes.

The reason for using something that can do blog presentation well is to be able to have a development blog again. I’d like to dig back into doing more research into different concepts, tools, and algorithms and then actually do something with them. Plus if I’m going to spend the time, hopefully someone else can learn from my mistakes, so plaster that up on the Internet to be made fun! Yeah!

So here’s the initial plan, in no particular or guaranteed order:

XNA / MonoGame user input handler for keyboards and gamepads. The hope is to make the XNA platform ‘support’ event-driven user input in use, even if practice will still be polling every game cycle.

The “Marching Squares” algorithm for converting obstacles into terrain outlines.

Experimenting with the Douglas-Peucker algorithm to improve the output of the above “Marching Squares”

Researching how Delaunay triangulation works and how to implement it in a resource or computation time friendly way.

Navigation Mesh for AI pathfinding of a dynamically generated environment, using the above.

Implementing this procedural dungeon generation algorithm using the above techniques and rigid body physics to prevent overlays. This is the end-all-be-all of the above set of topics. It just looks like fun and I want to understand all of the underlying pieces, even if I’m not going to create my own rigid body physics engine (there are only so many hours in a day and a lifetime to reinvent the same tool time and again…).

Please keep checking back over the weeks/months/years and hopefully there will be some progress to show similar to the above topics. This should be fun…